The Mad Scientist: Lisa gets invited to work at a prestigious science institute, seeing it as an opportunity to get away from her crazy and crowded family life.
Missed Connection: Lori and Bobby worry that dating long-distance is causing them to lose their connection.
"The Mad Scientist"
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Lisa does it at the end of the episode.
- Catapult Nightmare: Lisa wakes up like this when she has a nightmare while sleeping at the institute.
- Chekhov's Gun: The episode opens with Lisa explaining her theory about time travel to three other scientists. In the climax, she uses this to solve her problem.
- Continuity Nod: Lisa’s chemistry setup seen in the title card is the same one she used in "Making the Grade" for making the strep throat cure.
- Lisa checks to see if she still has all eleven of her toes after time-traveling—it was revealed back in "Potty Mouth" that she has an extra toe on one of her feet (as the result of a "nuclear experiment gone wrong," as Lisa calls it).
- Covered in Gunge: When Lisa tries to make herself a PB&J sandwich the way Lincoln does, she and everything around her winds up covered in peanut butter and jelly:Lisa: How does he do it?
- A Day in the Limelight: For Lisa.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: And this is the first episode to really bring up the downsides of being a four-year-old Child Prodigy who's Wise Beyond Their Years:
- When Lisa calls her family to tell them that she wants to stay at the Institute permanently, Rita argues that it's not a good idea—she elaborates by noting that while Lisa's always been very smart and mature for someone her age, she is still Just a Kid. Rita also claims that Lisa's never really been away from home like this prior to being at the Institute.
- Rita's ultimately proven right because, after Lisa decides to stay at the Institute permanently, she ends up really missing her family, particularly for two reasons:
- 1.) Outside of science-related matters, Lisa really doesn't have anything in common with the rest of the people at the Institute.
- 2.) For all her intelligence and maturity, Lisa ends up having quite a bit of trouble performing certain tasks on her own without her siblings and/or her parents around to help her (like putting her pajamas or making herself a sandwich).
- E = MC Hammer: Lisa’s equation for time travel. Plus, the machine she eventually builds to achieve said time travel runs on magnets, plutonium and (for some odd reason) banana peels.
- Epic Fail: Lisa's attempt at making a sandwich somehow ended up making a huge mess in the kitchen. And no sandwich.
- "Eureka!" Moment: After Leni bemoans that Lisa couldn't just go back in time and simply choose not to go to the institute, Lisa writes it off as being impossible, before saying she needs to give a presentation on her time travel studies. Thankfully, no sooner does she say this out loud does she realize her solution.
- Foreshadowing: When faced with the prospect of making a PB&J sandwich by herself, Lisa shrugs off any potential difficulty since she recently cracked time travel.
- Gasshole: Lynn, who farts when walking past Lisa's room. The very first lyrics of Lisa's song about living in the institute is how the only gases she smells now are of the "noble kind".
- Gross-Up Close-Up: The moldy cupcake that Lincoln and Lana found behind the radiator, which has a used bandage in it, among other things. Lana
eats it. - Inelegant Blubbering: Mr. Loud does this at the thought of his second-youngest child moving to the institute permanently. Mercifully, we can only hear his gross sobbing.
- Irony: Lisa is afraid of nightmares like any child. And in the absence of parents, how does she fight the nightmare? Sleeping hugging a skeleton! After all, what exactly is she afraid of?
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Lisa is known for performing surgeries and other experiments on her siblings against their will. When the institute's feeding machine injects ice cream into her veins, she finds it horrible and rejects the injection of candy.
- Now Lisa can experience a small fraction of the pain she inflicted on Lincoln by kicking him out of the house in "No Such Luck".
- Mental Time Travel: In a nutshell, this is basically how Lisa's time machine works.
- Motivation on a Stick: While Lisa's video calling her family to explain to them how she wants to stay at the Institute permanently, Luan can be seen doing this to Leni with a dollar bill.
- Not So Stoic: Lisa cries missing her family.
- Post–Wake-Up Realization: Lisa wakes up while sleeping at an institute, having had a nightmare. She goes to tell her parents about it before realizing that she's not at home.
- Powered by a Black Hole: Lisa invents a Time Machine that involves both a black hole and a wormhole in its construction.
- Running Gag: Lisa using scientific terms to explain her emotions and feelings, such as defining having "butterflies in her stomach" or having "a lump in her throat."
- Security Blanket: When staying at the institute proves to be a lot harder than she expected, Lisa ends up using a model skeleton to give her comfort during the night.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After her first night of staying at the institute, Lisa calls her family and apologizes for what she said the day before, assuring them that she really does love and care about them and that she also really misses them—hearing this, her dad (speaking for himself and the rest of the family) says that Lisa should just come home. But for as much as she'd love to do that, Lisa feels that doing something like that would not only ruin her scientific reputation, but also any potential future job/career prospects. After ending the call, Lisa ends up using her time machine to go back to when she was first offered to come to the institute and simply turn it down.
- Shout-Out: Lisa's time machine acts more or less like the one from Quantum Leap: she effectively leaps into her past self.
- Squick: Lana eating the spoiled cupcake she and her brother found, even after the Gross-Up Close-Up of how disgusting it is and after Lisa explained what the consequences of eating it could be.
- The Story That Never Was: Lisa’s time travel at the end effectively undoes everything that has happened in this episode and ensures it won’t happen again, with only her remembering the original timeline.
- Technicolor Science: The research lab is full of it.
- Tempting Fate:
- When Mr. Loud asks Lisa what’s wrong with working from home, her point is immediately proven by the other siblings acting loud and rowdy.
- Lisa expects that making herself a PB&J-sandwich can’t be too hard. She fails miserably.
- Waxing Lyrical: As it's customary for Luna. When Lisa shows the family her chart where she claims her pursuit for science holds a bigger space in her mind than her emotional attachments:Luna: Dang. You're as cold as ice, brah.
"Missed Connection"
- Bird-Poop Gag: Sergio poops on the newspaper Lori intended Bobby to read.
- By the Lights of Their Eyes: While at a restaurant called "The Dark Side of the Spoon," it's so dark inside that all that can be seen are Lori and Bobby's eyes.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Lori and Bobby.
- Decon-Recon Switch: Lori and Bobby experience some of the harsh realities of having a Long-Distance Relationship, namely in that they're hard to maintain. Luckily, by the end of this episode, they make it work.
- Inelegant Blubbering: Lori and Bobby do this when they think their Long-Distance Relationship isn't working. Lampshaded by Flip, who calls them "snot faces."
- Locked in a Room: Near the end of the episode, Bobby gets locked in the bathroom of Flip's Food & Fuel.
- Missed Him by That Much: When Lori and Bobby drive to each other's houses to see each other, they pass right by each other in their vehicles.
- No Sympathy: Upon finding Bobby crying over the prospect of his relationship with Lori failing, Carl is the only Casagrande who doesn't care. Instead, he tries to sabotage Bobby's attempts to get together with Lori by switching Bobby's flash drive with his own, which contains a video of Carl singing off-key while playing a guitar.
- Running Gag: Carl trying to prove that he's mature enough to date Lori, only for one of his parents to do something that reminds him he's still Just a Kid.
- Shout-Out: The restaurant that Lori and Bobby visit is called Dark Side of the Spoon.
- Slippery Skid: At the start of the episode, the freezer of the bodega has another meltdown, spilling molten ice cream all over the floor. Hector is seen sliding across the floor as a result.
- Split Screen: Happens a lot whenever Bobby and Lori are calling each other or saying the same thing at the same time. It's most notable when they tearfully tell their relatives that they "had the most awkward conversation ever."
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Lalo the dog ends up performing one as a result of Bobby having him lick the remaining spilled ice cream on the floor.
